Mistress La Spliffe is shrewish

You know, the bloody Economist. I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's my favourite magazine ever, and if I was stuck on a desert island with a reliable subscription I'd only wail and gnash my teeth half as much as I would have otherwise. But only they could do something as egg-headedly chauvinistic as comparing hidden female oestrus to an 'evolutionary arms race between the sexes'. No, scratch that. Only they would find such a snarky huge metaphor to elaborate on what the mainstream attitude to evolutionary biology amounts to: a five-million year version of Taming of the Shrew. Fuck me, people are tedious.

(Just to go off course for a moment on how tedious people are - have you noticed? Complaining endlessly about how fucked up, complicated, baffling, infuriating, evil, inferior and all the rest of it the opposite sex are, and yet still devoting thousands of hours of brain power and billions of dollars to being noticed, accepted and loved by that same opposite sex when they could be painting or reading a book or something. Fucking tedious. Like a poisonous spiny fish that desperately wants to be cuddled by a grizzly bear. Make up your mind, you pack of twats, or just shut the fuck up and go home and jerk off. Bleeding Jeebus, it gives me the shits. Okay, digression done.)

Anyways, it's this sort of mainstream opinion that gives mainstream opinions a bad name, because it starts from an assumption about our nature which I think is assuming too much. And that is that the fundamental nature of human sexual relations is that a woman tricks a man into staying with her and sharing his resources with her, which a man will only do if he's convinced her children are also his. And hidden oestrus helps with this by only letting a man be sure her children are his if he stays with her nearly constantly and fucks her all the time. And this is why today we all get married and only nail other people on the down-low. It seems like all evolutionary theories in the Western world start from this point, to either reinforce or modify it but never to reject it and admit that maybe marriage is just a construct.

There are countless indications to tell us stay-and-fuck-constantly marriage model is flawed - societies where marital-type situations are of no importance compared to avuncular or matrilineal blood ties, societies where women select their mates out of line-ups, polyandrous societies. But perhaps most damningly for the the stay-and-fuck-constantly model, there's the fact that men never stay and fuck their women constantly, even in the most monogamous of monogamous societies, because it's their job to chase and kill animals and each other. Marriage is just one breeding model of dozens and dozens, and there's no evidence at all it was some sort of original, instinctual or 'right' model. It just happens to be ours so that's what everybody works with.

But oh wait - come back to it - because now we have a really important indication of how the stay-and-nail-constantly theory needs adjusting to make it right. Dr. Wilson has announced the results of his Albuquerque study: strippers make more money when they're ovulating and less when they're infertile, which means men must be able to perceive fertility on some level, which turns all this back into a slightly more complicated evolutionary Taming of the Shrew instead of the glorious and varied pageant that human sexuality is. This means the men can fuck their women when they're fertile and go off killing animals and each other when they're not, and still be pretty sure any kids popped are theirs. Huzzah! Marriage makes perfect evolutionary sense again! We're right! Africa, etc., is wrong!

Never mind that if he had actually spoken to the strippers, his sister, mother, wife, granny, or, like, any chick ever, he could have found out that women have more energy and sexual interest in men when they're ovulating and less when they're on the pill or on the rag. And possibly, possibly that might make strippers dance a little bit more energetically and engagedly, and possibly that might result in the punters giving them more money. But noooooo. That's far too simple. It must be about an evolutionary arms race between the sexes and the marriage model must be just plain simply fucking right.

Holy fucking tittyfuck. I can't believe people get funding to make this shit up when I have to work for a living. Did I mention people were tedious?